How far we’ve come

In a recent Facebook group post, I mentioned that the Texas State Sacred Harp Association sponsored a monthly publication called the Sacred Harp Monitor. At the September 1913 session of the United Sacred Harp Musical Association, they adopted the Sacred Harp Monitor as an organ “for Sacred Harp singers of the United States. This was the result of a formal resolution read and passed by the Convention at Atlanta, Ga., at its recent session. T. B. Newton, of Woodstock, Ga., moved its adoption…”

In the same issue of the “Monitor” where this is announced (October 1913, p. 7), the editor, Elder M. W. Miracle, did not shy away from talking about “religion” (as some modern singers suggest we must do). He wrote an almost two-page piece about “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand” by Samuel Stennett. He says, “Like the children of Israel of old time, who had drank the dregs of Egypt’s bitter and its sweets, the children of Spiritual Israel have been made to realize the vanities of their temporal Egypt, and their eyes of faith are set on Canaan’s fair and happy land…This old sinful nature hangs like a dark cloud between them and the ‘other shore.’ It clogs their weary steps and dulls their spiritual appetites. O but for the sustaining grace and guiding hand of God, they would never reach the right crossing and ‘be forever blest.’ It is sweet to feel that uplifting and guiding hand when we fall, knowing that we never fall so low that His tender hand is not under to raise us up again, and place us on Pisgah’s lofty heights, bidding us to look eastward, northward, southward, and westward and behold the vernal beauties to which we are legal heirs” (Sacred Harp Monitor, October 1913, pp. 8-9). Beginning on the same page as the United announcement (p. 7), Elder Miracle wrote about “Afflictions” (see picture below).

Affliction though they seem severe,
Are oft in mercy sent;
They stopped the prodigal’s career,
And caused him to repent.

How far we’ve come from Atlanta 1913!